Talk about a mess…

Just one more post about the car nightmare… This is just too crazy to be believed.

So, the car was towed to the shop two and a half weeks ago.  Six days after it was towed, I called to ask if they’d found a replacement engine yet.  Well, yes, just that day and it should be delivered the next day.  It ended up not being delivered until 2 or 3 days late.  A week after I was told it should be there the next day I was told they were just now taking the old engine out.  They got the old engine out, got the new one in, and it wouldn’t start… no spark.  After hours and hours of diagnostic tests they determined that the computer in the car that sends signals to the sensors on the engine was dead.  So they got a new computer and got it in.  The car started and ran… but… the used engine they’d bought that was supposed to be in great shape blew up!  It began to knock as soon as they started the car up and when they took it for a test drive the engine was smoking and blew up when they got back to the shop from the test drive.  So, they called the company they bought the engine from (it was under warranty, thank goodness) and already have another one delivered.  So now they have to install it and hope all goes smoothly with it.  But with all the delays and problems there have been so far, I’m really not counting on that!  I just can not believe the amount of bad luck I’ve encountered with this situation!

Frustration and kindness

When I first woke up this afternoon and started planning this blog entry it was going to be one full of anger and frustration.  But a knock on my door this evening changed it to a story about the kindness of strangers.

I’ve come up with the money to have a new engine put in my car.  The shop that’s doing the work has had the car for just over 2 weeks now.  Every day since last Friday I’ve thought and been told “This is the day you get your car back.”  And every day it’s been one delay after another.  Yes, I know this is to be expected but it’s frustrating.  What’s making me angry is not only the delays but the shop’s lack of communication in keeping me up to date about the delays.  Every bit of information I’ve gotten from them has come only after I call them… they have not made any effort to call me to keep me informed.  The whole nightmare is just frustrating and I’m stressed over it. 

But a knock on my door this evening really changed my mood.  I have a neighbor across the hall, a very nice woman who moved in about four months ago.  She knocked on my door and did the most wonderfully kind thing!  She knows my car has been broken down because she’s not seen it in my assigned parking spot and had asked me about the rental car I had one day.  So she knocked on my door to tell me she recently bought a new car and will have her old car for another two weeks.  She offered me the use of it until then and gave me the key to it!  This woman barely knows me and had no reason to do this for me.  She is doing it simply to be kind.  I will really really hopefully have my car back any day now so won’t need to borrow hers for long, but having the use of it is just so helpful.  I am so very thankful for her offer!  I told her that, of course.  And I plan to buy her a nice plant arrangement or fruit basket or gift certificate somewhere to thank her for her kindness.  It is just so nice to know there are such kind people in the world!

Life throwing lemons

Life definitely threw a lemon at me last night.  I was in my car when suddenly it made some horrible, awful noises.  Clanking, really bad noises.  It’s only 7 years old and never had any major problems at all before and gave no warnings that the engine was about to die a horrible death.  To make a long story short, the engine threw a fuel injector through the oil pan and the engine is ruined.  It is barely repairable, could be repaired, but it would cost about the same amount of money to just replace the engine.  So after deliberating about it, that is my plan.  Well, my more immediate plan is to save the money to pay for the new engine and it’s installation as quickly as I can.   Then to have the engine replaced and have my car back.

Until then, I will be using public transportation.  Something I haven’t done in several years.  But it’s my only feasible option at this point.  And as my sister pointed out, it’s environmentally friendly.  And if I keep a positive outlook about this, I can think of it as some forced down time to get lost in my thoughts and relax.  It’s not the end of the world.  I am safe, I still have a job and a way to get there and a roof over my head.  My basic needs are still being met.  So my mode of transportation to work may not be my first choice, but it is a way to make it there.  The bus stop I will be using to catch the bus to work is about eight blocks away.  Not bad at all.  The whole situation could be much worse.  I keep trying to hold on to that thought to get through the stress and disappointment. 

I had to have the car towed 50 miles home.  That was expensive.  And I was really kicking myself for having let my AAA membership lapse this past spring.  But I made it home safely… and that’s what’s really important, right? 

Walking and Music

Tonight I went walking on the walking path for 30 minutes.  That’s the second night in a row and it felt great.  I had to quit walking about six weeks ago just before the surgery on my toe because it was just too painful.  But now that the surgery is over and healed well I got back to it.  I plan to make it back to the 45 minutes to an hour that I was walking each day, four times a week.  I want it to become a habit again. 

As I was walking tonight I had my iPod with me, as usual.  In a space of 25 minutes I heard Patsy Cline, The Stray Cats, Phil Collins, My Chemical Romance, and Ozzy Osbourne.  I chuckled to myself about the diverse range and my eclectic musical tastes.  I realized I’ve always like a wide range of music.  In high school my not-so-well-hidden secret was that I like country music and would listen to Daddy Don’t You Walk So Fast by Glen Campbell to fall asleep.  I joke sometimes that like the old Barbara Mandrell song goes, I was country when country wasn’t cool.  But that’s what I mostly grew up listening to.  Publicly I proclaimed my love for Motley Crue and my desire to marry the lead singer, Vince Neil, and bear his children.  That was much cooler at the time than liking country music.

I mentioned I mostly grew up listening to country music.  And that is what mom usually had on the radio.  But she also sang Puff the Magic Dragon to us as a lullabye and likes Billy Joel and would listen to The Cars with my sister and I.  So obviously I learned my varied musical tastes in part from my mom.  Yet another way I am indeed her daughter… as if there were ever any doubt. 

My sister is partly the cause of my eclectic musical tastes, as well.  She frequently mentions new musical artists to me to encourage me to listen to them.  And as teenagers she would often buy me albums of new artists she wanted me hear for birthday and Christmas presents. 

Lately my musical tastes have gotten even more eclectic as I’ve been listening to an online radio station at www.bglradio.net and being exposed to even more genres of music and more bands I may not have thought to listen to.  I have always wanted to think of myself as well rounded, and this is really fun for me to hear a new song I may not have thought to give a chance before and think “Hey, I really like that song.”   

So thanks to everyone who has played a role in developing my varied musical tastes.  I appreciate it!

A Post … just because

It’s been a while since I’ve written a post.  Just been busy the past few days getting my house and life organized and in order.  Nothing wrong, happy with my life, just felt very disorganized.

So yesterday on the phone mom told me to post something… anything… Go take pictures of something near me and post them.  So I went through the pictures on my memory card and found some I’d taken at a local park about a month ago.  It’s a very nice park, and large… nice big pond to walk around.  So here are two pictures of the park. 

I have taken some recent pictures of my new cat, Tinkerbell.  She is a stray and I adopted her from a local cat rescue organization.  She is very skittish and shy but coming out of her shell nicely.  She will lay on the couch once in a while and let me pet her just for a few minutes.  And twice in the past two days she has walked up to me and put her paws on my leg and meowed at me for attention.  Before that she had never initiated contact with me.  So I’m happy that she’s doing well.  Here are two pictures of her. 

A day to remember for always

This is actually a repost of a blog post I wrote last September 11th.  It’s still one of my personal favorite posts of mine, so instead of trying to rewrite it, I’m simply reposting it.

I think every decade or two has an event occur in history that is so momentous that virtually anyone who was alive during that time can tell you exactly where they were when they heard that news. The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 were that event in history for the current decade.

I was at work at approximately 6:30 that morning PST in a hospital in Spokane, Washington. I was walking down the hall and glanced into a patient’s room and noticed our charge nurse standing there staring at the television with a stunned expression on her face. This is a nurse who has 30 plus years of experience dealing with life and death situations every day. The fact that whatever was unfolding was stunning her scared me before I even knew what was unfolding. I glanced up at the tv in time to see the second tower of the World Trade Center crash to the ground. As I heard that this was the second tower to fall the charge nurse and I glanced at each other and almost at the same time said “This was no accident.” The patient grabbed my hand and all three of us in the room had tears either in our eyes or streaming down our cheeks. The last hour of that shift until I got off work at 7:30 was the quietest and most somber I’d ever seen the floor I worked on. Staff were concerned about a co-worker of ours who was due to fly back from Boston that morning. Some patients had family and friends in the NYC area and were frantically trying unsuccessfully to reach them. As the day shift staff came in it was apparent right away many of them had been crying recently. At least one staff member was crying as she said she’d tried to reach our co-worker stuck in Boston for the past hour and not been able to reach her cellular phone. All of us expressed feelings of shock and sadness. More that one of us used the word surreal to describe how the whole situation felt. As I left work that morning the news announcer on the radio was announcing it was just becoming clear just how many people were presumed to be dead. I drove home with tears streaming down my face.

Later that morning my mother and I drove to Airway Heights, Washington near Fairchild Air Force Base. The base was locked down, of course. We were approximately three or four miles from the base entrance and within a five minute span saw no less than six local police patrol cars. The fact that the perimeter of the base was being patrolled so closely really made it seem more real to me because that hit so close to home. I went home and cried myself to sleep. I can’t think of a single day in my life when I have shed so many tears in one day. Each year on September 11 I can’t help but remember exactly where I was and how I felt when I heard the tragic news. I imagine that I, like many, many others, will continue to remember that for a very long time.

My new favorite product find

A friend of mine makes these wonderful hand made glycerin soaps.  There are some really lovely and unique scents and the soap lathers really well and isn’t drying at all.  The tropical blend scent is my current favorite.  I just can’t say enough about these awesome soaps.  This is the link to the page to order them if you’re so inclined.  http://www.hawaiisoaps.net

Be sure and tell her Brooke sent you! 

Good day / Bad day

Today was both a good day and a bad day.

In the good news department, I got a $1/hr raise in pay that was on my paycheck today.  Not a huge raise, but nothing to sneeze at, either, certainly.  I’m thankful for any increase.

Now in the bad news department, I got an e mail from Dell that was frustrating.  I had ordered a new laptop on August 2.  It had an estimated ship date of August 31.  Four weeks.  But it’s pink and has a lot more memory and bigger hard drive than the one I have now, so it was worth waiting for.  Now it turns out that there is a delay and the new estimate date they will ship it to me is September 27, four more weeks.  There was a link in the mail to an official Dell blog explaining the delay.  Apparently when they started offering colored laptops they did test runs of different paint jobs.  The test runs went fine so they started mass producing them.  Well, when they started producing them in larger volumes they came across some problems with the paint jobs and dust showing up and things not meeting their quality checks.  And there’s also some problem with the new type of LCD displays they’re using.   So they have quite a backlog, apparently, that they’re working to catch up on as they resolve these issues.  I know I could just cancel the order and let it be and quit complaining.  But it’s exactly the laptop I want so I don’t really want to do that.  So instead I’ll wait as patiently as I can (which isn’t all that patiently at all). 

What a crazy world

I know we live in a violent world and voilent things happen … even close to home.  But lately there have been some very sad, very violent things happening too close to home for comfort at work.

About a month ago a 22 year old girl was brought into the ER after a being shot.  She died very soon after arriving there.  Her injuries were so severe there wasn’t much the ER staff could do.  They did try very hard, though, to save her life.  And afterwards her family got violent with ER staff and began assaulting them.  A nurse was hit with a lamp, the family members were picking up other pieces of furniture and throwing them, and the family waiting room in the ER was trashed when the ruckus ended.  The entire ER was locked down for almost two hours.

Last night I arrived at work to be told to hurry to get report on my team of patients because the nurse I was following had been hit by a patient and needed to be seen in the ER.  Well, when I saw the nurse I saw right away it wasn’t just a slap she’d received.  The entire left right side of her face was red and swollen and painful.  One of the orthopedic doctors in town was on the floor seeing a patient and told her he thought her cheek bone may be fractured.  The patient delivered quite a punch.  The nurse went downstairs to the ER and I haven’t heard any more yet about how she is doing.

And then last night later in the shift I heard that one of the staff members of the hospital who I work with once in a while and think is just a really sweet woman was shot in the head by her 19 year old son a few days ago.  At this point it’s unclear if she will survive.  She is being kept chemically sedated and on a ventilator and was going to surgery today to have one of her eyes removed that the doctors weren’t able to save.  I don’t know the details of the shooting, but the story is that it was intentional.  Just a sad, sad situation. 

Time for an update

I’ve been off work for a week… you would think I’d have had time to write a blog entry before this.  I can’t really tell you what I’ve been doing with my time other than wasting it and relaxing and healing from my surgery.

Surgery was last Friday and went great.  I woke up from anasthesia wide awake and feeling good.  Pain was bad the first night but not bad at all since.  Post-operative appointment with the surgeon was Monday morning and he said it’s healing well.  He also told me the bone spur was worse than the x-rays showed and had actually broken through skin.

When he got the dressing off my foot I looked at my toe and said “Ew, it’s ugly.”  He chuckled and said “No, it’s beautiful, it’s healing great.”  We obviously were meaning different things by ugly and beautiful.   

Today I got to take the dressing off and put just a band aid over the incision.  The pain has been just very minor and it was feeling good to walk on it normally today without a bulky dressing.  Well, it was feeling good until about an hour ago when I stubbed my toe against my desk and said bad words my mom still yells at me for saying.  (Sorry, mom, but it really hurt.)  Bottom line is it’s healing well, I’m doing well, and ready to get back to work tomorrow night.

And in other news. I adopted another cat.  That’s two now.  She’s an 11 month old white and light gray beautiful girl named Tinkerbell.  She’s a very scared thing right now.  She was a stray and then has been in two foster homes over the past month so this is her third home in a month.  She’s spent the past day and a half since I brought her home hiding under my bed for the most part.  She comes out to her litter box and goes right  back under there.  I have her food and water sitting right under the edge of the bed.  She will stretch her legs out until her paw is just about an inch from my hand and meow at me but isn’t really wanting me to touch her much yet.  And as much as she’s been through lately, I’m not pushing the issue.  She doesn’t run away from me and isn’t aggressive towards me, so I figure she’ll warm up to me eventually.  My other cat, the one I refer to as Demon, has hissed at her just a few times and I’m keeping him away from her until she gets more comfortable here.  He will just have to learn to live with her.  And I think that is about all the news here… Hope you’re all well.